Cisco wireless LAN system has enterprise focus

By Patrick Mannion
iApplianceWeb
(02/27/03, 10:26:10 AM EDT)

Manhasset, N.Y. - Cisco Systems Inc. is unveiling client-side wireless LAN adapter extensions that promise to tackle the security and network-management concerns the company said have slowed WLAN deployment to date.

Intended as augmentations to the current IEEE 802.11 standard and its associated Wi-Fi interoperability testing, including Wireless Protected Access, the enhancements have garnered support from leading WLAN semiconductor suppliers and PC and mobile-device OEMs alike.

The extensions are derived from Cisco's enterprise-oriented enhancements to the IEEE 802.11 standard. Version 1.0 was first fielded last October and mandates the use of Cisco's Leap authentication scheme, active scanning to support virtual LANs (VLANs) and the use of Cisco's original implementation of the temporal key integrity protocol.

"We essentially took various pieces of Cisco intellectual property that we felt are particularly important to enterprise customers and codified them into what we call the Cisco Compatible Extensions, or CCX," said Ron Seide, senior product line manager of Cisco's wireless networking business unit.

"Silicon vendors can take these specs and under a free licensing model put them into their reference designs and provide those to their various PC OEM and client-adapter customers," he said. After implementing the CCX extensions, the OEM or adapter-card manufacturer would then take the devices to Keylabs, an independent testing house, where the devices would be tested for compliance using a test program designed by Cisco. Upon passing, the devices would then receive the Cisco-compatible logo. There is a nominal fee for compliance testing.

"What we're offering to our customers is a broader range of client-adapter form factors and operating-system support, feature support and also price points, all with complete interoperability with Cisco's wireless infrastructure," said Seide.

To date, the list of those supporting CCX includes Intel, Texas Instruments, Intersil, Agere, Atheros, Marvell and Atmel on the silicon side and Hewlett-Packard and IBM among PC and mobile-device OEMs. "We'll work with these adapter manufacturers to market the logo so mutual customers will realize their expanded options," said Seide.

"It's exciting because there's a lot more to a complete solution than what's in the IEEE specification," said Rich Redelfs, president and chief executive of Atheros, which recently announced four PC design wins, including IBM, Toshiba, H-P and NEC, for its multi-mode 802.11a/b chipset.

"The combination of the high-speed multimode, which takes care of the backward compatibility and scalability and higher performance, combined with Cisco's interoperability for network management, security and deployment, is what the enterprise needs to deploy WLANs."

For more information, go to www.cisco.com.

But for instant access to more informationabout the issues, products and technologies mentioned in this story, click on the flashing icon in the upper right hand column on any page on this site. It will take you to an alternate view of iApplianceWeb based on an associatively-linked XML/Java Web map that can be used to search for any topic published here over the last 12 months.

This map allows any story on the site to be accessed by date, by category, by title, or by keyword, with results displayed within seconds either as a list of possible hits or with specific Web pages displayed below the map, which is adjustable depending on the number of hits and the number of links.

For technical article coverage, go to the  iAppliance Web Views  page and access the EETimes In Focus maps there to browse or quickly search for all articles on a particular topic since the beginning of 1999.